Blogs from Boston: Virtual Trust (Part 3)

Continuing from last time (Part 2), Heledd Straker, CIO Naked Generations, now reveals the secrets to creating dynamic switched on global culture inside organisations.

Many businesses are struggling to survive in the storm of the global recession, and trust between employer and employee is all but completely destroyed, indicating the failure of corporate current culture systems to bind together the workforce to create a resilient organisation.

At present, a corporate culture is usually designed around two key objectives: soft and hard. Soft objectives include loyalty, motivation and morale, while hard objectives include increased productivity, innovation and reduced costs. In order for a culture to be successful, two different types of trust are required to support each of the soft and hard objectives, which will serve to create a dynamic and resilient trust-based system.

In our previous blogs we discussed fixed trust, which arises from the building of social relationships, such as social networking sites, and swift trust, which comes from the rapid formation of teams, as seen in online games. At Naked Generations, we find that these two trusts can be overlaid on an organisation’s soft and hard objectives: relationship-based fixed trust helps improve a company’s soft cultural objectives, while task-based swift trust aids the effectiveness and efficiency of the company’s hard cultural objectives.

The success of networking sites and online games of building strong fixed and swift trusts, respectively, suggests that a dynamic trust-based system for an organisation can be realised online as a social media platform, which we refer to as a 'Switched On' Global Culture. An example of such a working system is the Obama presidential campaign. Obama used social media to build fixed trust relationships, and then employed swift trust by galvanising people to gather together and vote. His system was successful because he first built fixed trust and so was then able to initiate swift trust. This suggests that organisations must first create a social media platform for people to connect, so as to meet soft cultural objectives, which will pave the way for swift trust to be initiated, the resulting project successes thus fulfilling an organisation’s hard cultural objectives. And indeed this system works as, despite the overwhelming odds, Obama won the 2008 US Presidential Election and today rules one of the most powerful nations on earth.